


The Dress

by black_lodge



Series: the wonder that's keeping the stars apart [2]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Domestic, F/M, One Shot, Post-Episode: s08e07 Kill the Moon, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-23
Updated: 2015-09-23
Packaged: 2018-04-23 01:41:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4858364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/black_lodge/pseuds/black_lodge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>POST-"KILL THE MOON." They've all but called it quits on their adventures, but the Doctor has a proposition to make to Clara. And he's ever so good at grand gestures.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dress

They’ve had their spats before, but not like this – nothing like this. She has banished him, the mad man with his box, the man who no longer knew, who, despite all their travels together, despite saving one another countless times, despite her literally ripping herself apart for him, didn’t even hesitate when the choice came.

It’s not like he ever had a problem violating the Prime Directive before, she thinks bitterly in a moment of clarity brought about by the utter exhaustion he’s brought her to. The thought makes her scoff, though, and she flips over on the couch where she’s been alternatively lying comatose and howling into a decorative throw pillow. No, it’s just when it comes to the human race. When it comes to her. Because isn’t that the choice he made? To abandon her to the fate of the world? As if should the human race let him down, his condescending disappointment would be so complete that it would extend to even her?

“Well bugger _that_ ,” she cries and hurls the pillow across the room. “I’m not one of your detested pudding brains!” Oh no – she refuses to be a metonym for the human race as a whole. And is it really too much to ask that he treat her with slightly more regard than every other human? At the thought, WASP-y guilt at such presumption rears its head, but she leaps up, stamps her feet, and looses what the American poet Walt Whitman (whom her fifth-form class is currently studying) would call a “yawp.” It is most certainly _not_ a presumption. The rest of the human race hasn’t been there for him every step of the way on his long, long life. That was her. She was the one saving his life at every turn. Never mind what he owed her – it was common decency to honor her with the benefit of the doubt!

But no matter how hot the fire of her wrath, it can’t burn forever.

 

By the time the Doctor returns, she has softened somewhat. And the greeting he gives her is enough to take the poison out of her like vinegar on a jellyfish sting.

She doesn’t even hear the TARDIS when she next sees him -- he parks it somewhere outside, walks to her door like a normal person and rings the bell. She’s up to her elbows in soapy dishwater, wearing a sweatshirt that has definitely seen better days, and leggings that have lost a bit of their elasticity, and her hair is stringy after a three-day weekend of sloth, and a dozen other little embarrassing things that make her stomach shrivel like some sea creature shying away from a shadow when she opens the front door and finds him there.

They don’t say anything at first, just regard each other for a long moment. Clara tries not to be too obvious about looking him up and down. He’s in black tie for a century other than her own and all the black makes his pale face whiter and his silver hair shine. He’s carrying a slim black valise that she’s never seen before.

“Well, come in,” she says at last and steps aside so he can cross the threshold – and when, she wonders was the last time he knocked on her door instead of materializing the TARDIS in her bedroom as if he owned the place?

And – oh, she thinks. Is this him trying to tread lightly?

He moves around her flat like it’s a museum: looking, but not touching. She’s not sure she’s seen him this quiet before even when he was telling her to _listen! Listen!_

“Well, spit it out,” she says, but without any venom.

He glances up at her from beneath his long lashes, hands in his pockets as he carefully leans against the counter. His mouth is very pink, as are the edges of his eyes. Has he always looked so – so delicate and rabbity?

“I, ah.” He clears his throat and tries again, the pseudo-Scottish burr in his voice loosening a little. “I brought you something.”

He hands her the valise and quickly clasps his hands together before him.

She glances over the bag, then up at him. “I would’ve preferred an apology.”

“This is a foretaste of an apology,” he says, hands spread wide in offering. “The hors d’oeuvres, if you will, to a great bitter feast of my regrets.” There’s no hesitation in his voice, but penitence, and lots of it. There’s something about the low, gravely quality of his speech that reverberates straight through Clara so that her very soul resonates with it. She shivers uncontrollably.

“Do you want me to open it now?”

He tilts his head. “That’s what I was thinking, yeah.”

She sets the valise on the countertop, smooths her hands over the cool, worn leather. “D’you want some tea or anything?”

The Doctor hasn’t taken his eyes off of her and he shakes his head. “No, thank you.”

She eyes him, and then turns her attention back to the valise. The zip is heavy aluminium, quite old but rugged, and she can feel each tooth release as she drags it open. When she flips the top back she feels her breath catch in her chest. She feels the Doctor’s eyes never waver.

Inside — a wonder: beads in copper and rose gold tones, interwoven with jet spangles on a ground of silky black gauze. She lifts it to the light, and the beadwork shimmers over the netting in lines that converge in delicate webs with an architectural exactness in their  design. If the illuminated Chrysler Building at night were made into a dress, it would look like this.

For a whole minute she is perfectly unable to speak.

And she remembers, suddenly, that the Doctor is there, that he is in black tie, and that he is looking at her with eyes that seem unnaturally dark and bright at the same time.

“Doctor,” she sighs, and he shifts slightly. She can feel the heat of him, but it’s more than that. She can feel him with some liminal sixth sense that she can’t quite put a finger on, the same way you can walk through your front door and realize you left the telly on without seeing or hearing it. He fills up the space and the silence with an alien presence, one that she couldn’t ignore or overlook if she wanted to, and right now, when he’s this close, she feels as if it might just sweep her away.

“Put it on,” he suggests in a low tone, and that goes straight down her spine, seizing her in a shiver again.

“What, now?”

“Of course now. I brought it for you."

She looks down at herself and with a hopeless gesture that encompasses her shabby outfit, her dirty hair, her general tattered state, she sighs. "I can't put it on now. I'm absolutely filthy."

The Doctor's eyebrows perked up. "Are you?" He looks her up and down. "I can't tell."

Clara directs an annoyed puff of air upward, making her fringe dance away from her forehead, but before she can berate him, he's speaking again.

"Of course, I'll have to take your word for it, but if you feel you must, go bathe. I'll be here."

Clara blinked at him. "You really want me to put it on?"

He nods solemnly.

Gently, very gently, she drapes the dress over her arm. "Okay. Alright. But only because it's bloody gorgeous. Not because you asked me to."

 

She leaves the Doctor in the small kitchen while she slips away to the bathroom. She hangs the dress up on the back of the door and runs a shower almost hotter than she can bear, and soon she's standing under the spray, watching her brown skin turn a mottled red beneath the shower gel. She shaves her legs, washes her hair twice -- not because it's  _that_ dirty, but because she's so distracted by the thought of the Doctor sitting in her little kitchen, his immaculate, magnificent magician's coat making the place look even shabbier by contrast.

She should be bothered, she thinks. And indeed she is, but it's not anger so much that afflicts her, but pain. She hurts thinking about him, about what he thinks of her; she hurts from the force of her fear that he doesn't think she's worth his attention.

But as she cleanses her body, she starts to feel a kernel of joy germinating inside the pain, and its growth is so accelerated that by the time she steps out onto the bath mat, she's actually a little bit excited.

She towels off, dries her hair, automatically applies a spritz of perfume to her décolletage, and pokes her head out the door.

"Avert your eyes, I'm coming through."

"Averted," the Doctor returns, and she keeps her eyes on his back as she darts from the bathroom to the bedroom, one hand clutching the towel around her body, the other hand clutching the dress.

In her bedroom she pulls on and hooks together a certain selection of silky black underthings including a silky black slip, and then she shimmies into the dress, her eyes on her three reflections in the vanity mirrors.

The dress, she finds, is even better on.

When she pads into the kitchen, it's on bare feet, and she has to say the Doctor's name to alert him to her presence. He turns around, and when he sees her he takes his hands out of his pockets and stares.

"Could you zip me up?" she asks, grateful for the excuse to turn away from him -- his eyes meet hers with an almost audible electric crackle.

She feels his hands on the back of the dress, gently pulling the beaded fabric taut while he works the zipper up the last three inches that she couldn't manage herself. (Some dresses, she thinks, are made precisely with this moment in mind. This dress is one of them.) His fingers never even graze her bare skin.

She turns around slowly to face him when he's done. His hooded eyes are silent to her.

"I don't have shoes for this," she says with a half-apologetic shrug.

"You can find some on the TARDIS."

She bit her lip, averts her eyes, but doesn't answer.

"Please, Clara," he says, and the pleading tone in his voice draws her eyes back to his instantly. "I… have a proposition for you.”

Her heart turns over. “What kind of proposition?”

He comes even closer, reaches into the valise which is still sitting on the counter and withdraws a pair of slithery black gloves. He runs them through his bare hands in a gesture that indicates that, as adamant as he is about avoiding touch, there’s still something of the sensualist in him. “One — last — adventure,” he says softly.

She fights the urge to shrink under his gaze. “What kind of adventure?”

His hands freeze. “The kind that says I’m very very sorry indeed, and I know it’s asking a lot for your forgiveness right now, Clara, but I can’t let you go when your last memory of this is so very full of pain.” He gestures between them with his free hand. “So. If you’re not otherwise engaged….”

Clara shakes her head quickly. “I’m not,” she says instantly.

His eyes glitter, and for him it looks something like relief. “Then would you do me the honor of being my plus-one on the Orient Express?”

Clara twines her fingers through the somewhat prickly fringe of the dress that ends somewhere around her knees. The kernel of joy inside her explodes with such force that she shakes with a stifled laugh. “You’d better thank your lucky stars you have a time machine, mister,” she says, voice wobbling, “because it’s going to take me forever to put on my face.”


End file.
